A senior citizen's lament

November 6, 2011

The Republican presidential candidate debates have resurrected the long discredited trickle-down theory. Essentially, it claims that wealth accumulating in the hands of a few is good for all because it trickles down to the rest of us.

This brings to mind a humorous poem that my wife's Uncle Ted wrote back in the Reagan era. Ted fought WWII in New Guinea, which was called "the forgotten war of the South Pacific" in a 2007 book by James Campbell, "The Ghost Mountain Boys." It was like a much less publicized Iwo Jima.

Ted came back and went through a period of postwar adjustment. His older sister Marie, my wife's mother, recalled how at first he was hyper-vigilant: when indoors, with his back always to a wall and never in front of a window, and when outdoors, automatically scanning tall Wisconsin trees for snipers.

He re-acclimated to civilian life, got his engineering degree on the GI Bill, and moved to Seattle to begin a long career with Boeing.

He was one of Tom Brokow's Greatest Generation and Tom Hank's "unmemorialized heroes." An old picture showed a uniformed young man with the irrepressible smile that seemed to carry our side to victory.

When I first met him he was older, a charming curmudgeon, one of the last regalers who, like Marie, could recite verbatim long passages of epic poems and Shakespeare, memorized years before in a one-room country school.

He had songs and stories for any occasion, including Marie's wake in 1984.

In 2009 we visited him shortly before his 90th birthday. He was still mentally sharp, still with the astute observations, up-to-date jokes and creative puns including some real groaners.

Physically he was ailing, though, and we traveled to Seattle again some months later for his funeral that concluded at graveside with those moving military honors. No one got through the final salute and Taps with dry eyes.